multiversallogs | [ closed ] dusk dropped her starry gown

In flats for once, Ilde is already crouching at the edge of the bank, knees together to the side, regarding the water with a healthy suspicion. She'd have come in the water, ordinarily, but under the circumstances - with what they're here for - she wasn't sure that seemed like such a good idea.

(So at least she's clothed, this time, although any bystanders are still getting a better view of her arse than they might've bargained for.)

Most of all, her manner seems first affronted; startling out of the water like a skittish child is for humans and people Ilde doesn't like. She's not supposed to have to wear shoes and take a cab to get somewhere on the damned river.

And--

--and it had felt familiar.

Wolfgang waits until he's close and crouching by her before speaking, so she can see his lips, figuring she'll see his shadow coming up behind her. "Any birds?" He signs when he talks, too -- practise is the best way to get better but he's distracted and can't rely on it entirely when he's still awkward and stilted in ASL.

He has noticed on the way over that he didn't see any. He wonders if they're staying away on purpose or if that's just coincidence. Either way, it unnerves him, because he's so used to their presence.

He's also noted that she's clothed and dry, and guesses what that means.

“I think it must have been further south,” she says, frowning, but it's true that she hasn't seen any birds, in the water or above it. It feels different - maybe she's being paranoid, though. Maybe it feels different because she's anxious about it and she's projecting and this city is bizarre, anyway, and Echomire is a strange place--

(But she likes it here, usually, climbing the statues in the monster garden and absorbing the quiet.)

"I feel..."

He closes his eyes -- it helps to narrow down what he feels when he closes off his mundane senses. "Wrong. Cold." When he opens them again, his expression is mildly frustrated, because he can't narrow it down more than that. "You said you felt -- an awareness?"

He looks down at the water, aware that they are probably going to have to get into it to get anywhere. He's still reluctant. He's not a bad swimmer, but like any human, he's easy to overwhelm in the water and he can be drowned.

“Someone--” it's instinctive, someone and not something, but that's what awareness implies, isn't it? that there's some person aware somehow, “--was watching me.”

She sounds certain.

"Okay," he says. He lets out a breath, because he absolutely does believe her and that right there is troubling.

"You won't let me drown, right?" He's not planning on going far, just wading in a little in a shallow part, but if something really is in there, it won't take much for it to drag him deeper and hold him under. He is hoping that all that is going to happen is he's going to wade in apprehensively and then feel very silly for a few minutes, but...

Either way, he toes off his shoes and hauls himself down, putting one foot in. Touching it electrifies his senses, there is definitely a presence here that feels familiar to him, and he is very glad, again, that they're doing this in the middle of the day.

Kneeling down on the bank, close enough to the water that she's almost touching it and ready to drag him back out again if need be (not, notably, with her hands), Ilde nods and watches, her fingers curled into the mud and her backside resting on her heels. She thinks first that it'll be safer if he has his eyes on the deeper parts of the water and not on her, even if it limits their ability to communicate; a moment later she suspects that to be an anxiety placebo. There are all manner of possibilities for what they could be dealing with where it won't make a damned bit of difference which way he's looking.

“What do you feel?”

Wolfgang is quiet for a bit; he's trying to sort out what he feels versus what is coming from some outside source. He's not very good at this -- ten years out of practise will do that to you.

"Anger," he says finally, holding very still. "A lot of... just, rage. And under that, sadness, like --"

He doesn't get any further before a blue-nailed white hand shoots out from under the water and hauls him under. And it doesn't just pull him under -- it's like he's not even there anymore.

The crows are there, just as suddenly, lined up on either side of the river and screaming hellish warning cries.

Ilde kicks her sandals off as she flings herself into the water after him - she doesn't think, only reacts, the illusion disappearing even if her clothes mean it isn't replaced by a tail. It doesn't matter; she's a creature of the river with or without it, and her legs will drive her as far under as she needs to be to slide her hands under Wolfgang's arms before he can disappear entirely. Her physical strength is neglible and no match for that of the indistinct form grasping the other end of him, a blur of rage and the female form, but it isn't physical strength she relies on when she spreads her influence through the water and wills it to obey her, wrestling with the spirit for dominance in what should be her domain first. It's an undignified fight, Ilde pushing and struggling with the woman's grip with her feet as she tries to pull and push Wolfgang higher toward the surface--

--later she'll wonder what good she thinks it's going to do to kick a ghost in the face, but the water is behind her and she pulls hard.

While struggling to breathe -- he inhaled a bunch of water going down because he is an idiot -- he's still reaching, trying to get a feel for this mind or what's left of it; all there is is anger, blinding anger, and under that a sadness that feels familiar in ways he doesn't care to admit, the kind of despair that drives people to things that ought to be unimaginable.

She, meanwhile, is doing her very best to kill him or both of them, if she can manage it. She screams soundlessly underwater when Ilde's foot connects with a face that ought to be intangible, and the water around them displaces violently as boulders drop from the sky, large enough to crush either of them on their own but with added momentum. The water violently swirling around them is white-blue with a milkiness that makes it hard to see.

Just before they break the surface of the water -- he sees a face. It's not any of theirs.

Then there is air and he chokes and gasps, clawing at it, coughing up dirty water and spitting it out of every orifice in his face, which burns coming up.

“Person,” Ilde gasps, for all that it's pointless in that Wolfgang may not register it yet and there's not a chance in hell that she'll hear any theoretical response to this clever observation. “That was-- a person.”

Or what used to be one, what's left behind afterwards; the anger and the sorrow that was left in her wake, the familiar sense of something intimately familiar to Ilde that nevertheless feels like a violation to touch on in the river, where she has felt safe and powerful and good. She can't think about it clearly, but as they drag themselves out of the water it isn't her earlier outrage that lingers but a familiar and unasked for bone-deep weariness, the kind you can't weep for because there is a hollow place where that impulse used to be.

You never find anything pretty where it was.

Edited (REPETITION IT IS MY NEMESIS) 2012-05-15 11:32 (UTC)

On the bank, Wolfgang collapses on his side, coughing up water that is -- well, it's water. Transparent. Normal. Not the same colour the river was a while ago.

The colour it isn't, anymore, now that they're out of it, with nothing to show for that display but a murder of crows that stay just long enough to scold the both of them before taking wing. He doesn't hear what she has to say, no.

His face is pale and he's shaking, but he's fine, he's not in danger of anything but discomfort. His lungs are burning, as are his sinuses. Let's not do that again, he tries to say, but it mostly comes out as hurk as he hits his chest a few more times to try to settle it.

He did count on getting wet today, at least.

When he's finally breathing normally, he rasps, "Haunted." What is in the water is at least not a demon or some other kind of entity bound to the water with malevolent intent -- just a ghost. Someone who is lost.

“In the river.” Nothing this suggests to her, offhand, seems good - she mulls it over as she leans toward Wolfgang to examine him for signs of 'horrible drowning', just in case, if slightly belatedly. (She's extremely useful in preventing a drowning, which is a nicer thing to think about than how accomplished she is in causing one.)

She keeps thinking about the ghost's hands, more than anything else; milk-white and dead, properly dead, not like Ivan or Deacon. A haunting is a wretched thing and she feels more than a little wretched for having come so close to it, unsure now precisely what to do - that they should do something isn't a question.

Wolfgang props himself up on his elbows once he's breathing better -- laboured, yes, lungs on fire, but without choking -- and stays there for a few moments, not ready to get up yet. "I saw a face," he says, "towards the end -- not hers, it was... a man. Older than us, I think. Red hair, brown eyes. I..." He makes a gesture at his head, a wriggly hand and then flicking his fingers out, implying it will be more useful if he just sends her the image rather than try to describe it, because 'white guy with red hair' is not a very useful descriptor; if she assents, he'll go ahead and mentally project the face he saw for her.

"Maybe he knows something?" He sits up properly and starts wringing out his hair. He should have thought to bring a change of clothes, dry ones. "I'd like to figure out who she is, too. If she died recently, there might be a record."

Again, he doesn't stop to think we should tell someone else and leave this alone. He doesn't trust the police and he doesn't know much about Hellsing. Where ghosts are concerned, he'd rather not take any chances of someone who probably does not mean to hurt anyone being exorcised without the closure they need. "Ah -- thanks, by the way." You know, for not letting his fool ass get drowned.

Hellsing is something Ilde has always been vaguely in favour of - but mainly in an alarmingly similar to the already-alarming way she was taught from a young age to think of the police as a terribly useful thing for other people to have. (Social rank hath its privileges, such as viewing law enforcement as something both positive and irrelevant to you. Neither of these things are true as they think, but the privilege is in never having to know that.)

With the tenuous ties of interest she's had to that organization either dead (Boromir) or just gone (Lestrange), it doesn't cross her mind. Instead she's thinking about what sort of records Baedal keeps and how hard it might or might not be to get access to them, and trying to pin down what it is about the man whose face Wolfgang gives her that seems so peculiarly familiar. As certain as she is that she's never seen him before - and there is some quality about him that seems as though it would be memorable, even outside of the context that is admittedly bound to stick a face in your mind - she feels strangely as if she should know him, somehow, or should know something about him.

In the echo of somebody else's memory, it's too indistinct for her to be sure of anything but that she doesn't like it.

“Maybe he can tell us who she is.”

"Okay." Wolfgang pauses, then.

"How do we find him?"

There are three million people in this city, and all they have is a face, no name, no address. He might live in the area -- or he might not.

He might be able to pull more details out of the river, suspecting that if this man was involved there are enough strong emotions to make a psychic impression, but... he's never tried psychometry on something inconstant like a river, and he is reluctant to try it while there's a ghost currently inhabiting it.

Stymied by that, Ilde frowns down at the river - as if she can force an answer out of it just by staring hard enough, which is only true under particular circumstances that these so far aren't. “Taking his image door to door wouldn't be terribly subtle, would it?”

Liable to get them into trouble. ...more trouble than this. ...a different kind.

"No," he says-signs, gnawing on his bottom lip as he tends to do when anxious. (Which is all the time.) "And it would take forever."

Running his hands through his damp hair and wincing when they get caught in it, Wolfgang considers the quickest and most efficient course of action. "We need to talk to her." Talking it through out loud, or even in gesture, helps organise his thoughts. "But I don't think she can."

Ilde can probably guess where he's going with this -- if they can give whatever spirit this is a tangible body to communicate with, maybe she'll speak to them with words instead of attempted drownings.

It doesn't come to her immediately; there's a lot about the supernatural world that she doesn't know well enough to reach for instinctively, and most of what she knows is learned by experience. This isn't an experience she already has...but she is a bright girl, and there are only so many places that this can go.

“Wh-- oh.” She frowns, worrying her fingers with her teeth - she'll draw blood like that if she isn't careful, and probably the last thing they need is to literally put blood in the water - and studies him like she's trying to decide whether or not she thinks he's physically up to it. That is, in fact, what she's trying to judge; she quickly comes to the conclusion that she is the worst judge of that and that it's pointless. “Do you think that would work?”

"I think so," he says, although it should be established here that Wolfgang is a fucking idiot who isn't thinking in terms like is it also incredibly dangerous — but neither of them are good at that self-preservation thing, so.

The most qualified people for this, clearly.

"Can you make sure she doesn't pull me under again?" Because he's pretty sure she won't be able to pull him back up a second time, not with the spirit compensating now for the presence of another person with some domain over the water.

“I can do that-- it might not be comfortable.” Because in order to be sure, the simplest way to do it is to hold him in place with the water around him, and that's a little like being clenched in a fist that gets everywhere. So.

--it's better than drowning.

"None of this is going to be comfortable," he says, sounding more resigned than anything as he hauls himself back up and towards the edge of the river. He waits to be sure she's ready before he lets the water touch his flesh again, not wanting anyone to be surprised this time.

Wolfgang does not actually know what he's doing — this isn't something he's done before, but in feeling out the edges of magic, what he's discovered is that the limits of what he can do is what he wants to do. So. This should work. Still, he feels awfully silly standing there waiting for something to happen and for a moment he thinks maybe he was wrong, maybe it was some freak accident, a coincidental shared hallucination.

Then the water goes all white, like milk.

Ilde is ready and already holding onto him when the water changes, but when it does her grip tightens perceptibly - painfully, even, with Wolfgang playing the role of human rope in a tug of war between nymph and ghost. The woman in the water is doing her damnedest to be an unstoppable force vs Ilde's immovable object and if nothing else the struggle slows the moment down enough that he'll have time to do whatever it is he's intending to try before disappearing arse-first under the water.

This seemed like a much better idea a moment ago, which isn't saying a lt.

When he moves his submerged limbs, raising an arm out of the water, he is momentarily distracted by the fact that it seems to be covered in hair. White, wet hair, someone else's, the same colour as the water, which it simultaneously is, and —

Oh. Good, this is exactly what he wanted to do with his afternoon.

Wolfgang winces, but pain is — while not something he would choose to use as a focus, there is a reason it's so popular among mages of his type: it works well. What also helps: she, this spirit, has the same idea. Acquiring a human mouth in order to tell these people who keep coming into her river getting their shit everywhere —

"Get out!" she says, using his body. That is definitely a woman's voice, accent as close to native as Baedal gets.

“No,” Ilde snaps back, instinctively contrary and briefly, madly relieved to discover that yes, their dead woman does speak something she comprehends. The possibility that she might not had only struck her once Wolfgang was already in the water, and she has no idea what they'd have done otherwise. Then, “No,” still firm but not quite so sharp, and she's so glad she has to focus on Wolfgang's face and not whatever is going on by the water's surface. “You showed us a man-- do you want us to find him for you?”

"No! I never want to see him again!" she says.

There are flashes of images there, sequential, telling a story. She met him. She was young, she used to be pretty until the river bloated her grotesquely, turned her skin the texture of grey cheese. He never said I love you but she heard it anyway in the way he touched her hair, called her secret petnames when they made love, told her she was different from the other girls. They picnicked here, he gave her a Claddagh ring, the one still digging into her bloated finger. He never said I love you but he said he could see himself marrying her, so she waited, and then —

His things in her apartment, but he wasn't there. How her clothes didn't fit her anymore, but she wore the dress he liked. She poisoned herself before she jumped, just to be sure.

Below that, her feelings are pretty clear. Anger. Disgust. Anger. Sadness. Anger. Rejection — not that he left her, but that he left her to die.

"Get out of my river," she growls, her voice too low and raspy, like there's silt stuck in her (his) throat. She lifts them both in the air — Wolfgang, at least, if Ilde can't be moved from the water — and tosses them on the bank.

Moving Ilde would take more - this isn't her territory, but it is the river that she's part of now and she isn't easily stirred from it - but breaking her grip on Wolfgang isn't impossible, especially when holding someone there so tightly is something she's never needed to do before, not with someone else trying to force him out. It's an odd sensation, which would be more distracting in and of itself if not for the situation in which it occurs--

The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, though; that's familiarity. Recognition. She crawls out of the water on her own, palms and knees on the muddy bank, and wishes briefly and pointlessly that she didn't understand.

The narrative is a familiar one. He has a long time to think about it, lying there catching his breath again after having the wind knocked out of him. (This is the last time, he's not getting in there again for love or money, and he is briefly grateful she didn't think to duck him under, or crush him with a stone, or summon up one of Shada's children; he wonders if she can feel that.)

The story, though, it gets told in fiction all the time, especially old ballads. A woman falls for an unfaithful man, who hurts her or leaves her, so she swallows poison and jumps in the river. It should be straightforward —

but it isn't. It's a trope, but something being familiar does not make it real. Wolfgang occupies a strange grey area in terms of gender, so he can't say he has a woman's experience. But he's known them better than men and he has never known any woman to behave like that, ever, outside of stories written by men.

He sits back up on his elbows. "That didn't feel right," he says aloud eventually.

“It wasn't,” she says, sitting sideways and leaning her weight forward on her hands, wanting the water for steadiness and forcing herself to hold in place because getting back in there - here - is not a good idea and she knows that, even if every instinct she has protests. “I know what it was.”

Her eyes close. Jesus. She wishes she didn't.

(She wishes she believed he'd been sorry for something other than the consequence.)

"What was it?" Ilde looks — well, he can guess whatever it is, he's not going to like it. The wrongness of the scenario has settled over him like a cloak, leaving a strange itchy feeling. It feels like coming back to your desk to see everything moved an inch to the left.

Edited (DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY DEPARTMENT) 2012-05-31 17:37 (UTC)

Ilde exhales, brushing her hands off as she straightens, uncomfortable in her skin and uneasy with the sense of intrusion that comes with this particular kind of understanding. Some questions you regret asking; some answers you never ask for.

“Humans fall in love with fae all the time. If I took stories for gospel truth then I should be knee-deep in them-- half what's written about us is just poorly veiled sexual fantasy. 'The mermaid problem'. But it's different, with some.” She doesn't say 'of us' because this is not something she's ever wanted to be close enough to touch.

“It's different, it's an obsession, it isn't natural. It eats these women from the inside out, until there isn't anything left. There was a girl in our cohort, and I couldn't do anything for her, I didn't know what to do. Sonja knew how to undo it, but if she'd come back to the city any later, then it would have been like this. He looked familiar, but not like I knew him. Because I know what he is.”

A pause. He's not sure if he's interpreting this correctly.

His contact with the fae has been limited. He met some, but he was a child, the context was different — there were none of the romantic or sexual overtones that currently plague the urban supernatural landscape, they were the biting, mischief-causing, child-killing types, thoroughly unhuman and uninterested in fucking any.

"Would he... know?" That this is the effect he has, that this is the result of it. It's the difference between a tragedy and a predator.

“Yes,” she said, quietly. “If he's properly-- if he's always known what he is, if he's as powerful as her reaction suggests, then he should be able to control it.” It should be, her point is, something that he's capable of stopping; it makes it something he chose to do, or at most generous chose to allow.

Most fae are predatory somehow, mischievous and callous as cats, pretty troublemaking monsters that inhabit a very ambiguous place morally. Some aren't as ambiguous as others.

His reaction abruptly changes. Just like that. There is swift, penetrating anger, radiating outwards until he realises he is broadcasting and reels it back in, where it simmers somewhere under his skin. Reacting like this frightens him, but it is useful, so he keeps it there instead of dismissing it.

He looks back at the river, the colour and gentle current typical for a Givdi afternoon, no hair, no stones. They might have been here half an hour, an hour maybe. "How likely is it this is the first one?" His voice is flat, because he guesses the answer is 'not very'. The man he saw didn't look that young. Late twenties, maybe early thirties.

Wolfgang isn't wrong.

“I doubt it. The kind of logistical backflips required would make it...unlikely. Really unlikely.”

Her tone is-- not neutral, but flat, controlled.

"We have to do something." His glance there is questioning. He says we, but he wouldn't blame her for stepping out, here.

"She says she doesn't want to see him again, but... she needs closure; she needs to move on." At the very least, they need to talk to this man to find out who she is, to be sure that if she has any family, they get closure. It's a massive impending headache and, sitting up, he braces his head in his hands, aware of this. He's not even sure what 'do something' means. Drag him here, rub his nose in it like a bad puppy? He is fully prepared to do that. Report him to the authorities? That, he's much more hesitant over. For many reasons.

“Um...okay. What do we know? He is fae. He killed her. He's probably killed before. We don't know if it's purposeful or just...indifference.” Her expression is steady - mostly, except for on that last word. There, there's tension she has more trouble locking down. “And...she's a ghost. What do we know about ghosts?”

"Ghosts stay in the material realm when something is keeping them from moving on, and when their spirit is strong enough to outlive the flesh. They can get — trapped like this, locked in their pain, especially in this city. Reliving their last moments over and over."

He brushes his hair out of his face, his gaze firmly planted on the ground. "I mean, I'm not an expert, I just..." He trails off. "Knew a lot." Of ghosts. Lonely children will befriend anyone. "When they get closure, they tend to move on, and I think — I think if anyone does anything about this... person... it needs to be her."

He is talking about letting her kill him, yes. It seems more fair, in a way, than passing this off on well-meaning but detached strangers to review evidence — this woman's life — and then decide on some arbitrary punishment.

“So...we find him. And we bring him here.”

This makes sense to her; she remembers being in the rain, wearing a borrowed coat, being told to choose the one she hated most. When she's frightened, when she's uncertain, when she doesn't know where to find steadiness-- she remembers how his blood was so warm it felt like it'd burn her cold fingers, that he didn't make any sound, and how it had been almost like her own heart started beating again when his stopped.

She understands retribution, even if she doesn't always understand justice or closure.

"Yeah." He plucks a stray long white hair off his arm. It isn't his. Frowning at it and then the river, he considers for a while. "Okay. I can find out his name, but my things are all at home. You can come if you'd like, or I can meet you back here."

“I'll meet you back here,” she decides, mirroring his expression unintentionally as she glances back toward the river. “I should tell someone what I'm up to.”

...not...in any great detail, from the absent-minded tone of her voice.

"All right," he says, getting up slowly to leave. His everything is sore, but whatever, he'll deal with it, he's not dead. "An hour-ish, then." And he's got his CiD, should something happen between then and now.

He makes his way back home, because there are some supplies there he needs -- he's figuring out all this focus and ritual stuff mostly on his own, or else out of books, some from notes taken in Martel's library (and he's not certain whether the other man is keeping track of which volumes Wolfgang is studying, but would not be surprised) and some from books from occult stores, secondhand, other people's notes in them. It's one of those he takes up to the roof with him, because it is written in Hebrew, and he trusts his own people over others.

He also brings a saucepan from the kitchen, because like hell will he ever own anything that can actually be called a cauldron.

It's a pretty simple ritual: the pan gets filled halfway with distilled water, into which he adds three drops of river water, three drops of wax, and then spits in three times. (Sometimes magic is gross, but virgin spittle comes up over and over in his books, and -- it works.) He braids two of the hairs from the river along with one of his own together, then ties a golden ring to the end and suspends it over this, gently rocking it back and forth until it hits the edge -- ping, ping, ping...

On the seventh strike, the sounds begin to change, to take shape. He has to close his eyes to hear it properly, to see, his mind fixed on that face, her anger, her sadness, that face.

Berach Carmody, it says.

When he opens his eyes, he sees, in the wax floating on the surface of the water, that it has taken the shape of a house on a street, and it must be Baedal because he recognises the Spire in the distance behind it. It's gone just as suddenly, but he remembers, has it locked in his mind's eye.

Frowning heavily, he dips the ring in the water and swirls the whole thing up with his hand, disrupting the magic and ending the rote. It takes little effort to clean up, dry his hands, and climb back downstairs and back out the door, heading towards that same spot on the river -- this time armed with a name, a face, and an idea of where to look.

Edited 2012-06-22 10:42 (UTC)

When he gets back to the river, Ilde is there waiting for him - having cleaned herself up a bit, or at least having convincingly pretended to, and having sent a text to Ivan not to expect her for a while. Which is apparently what 'telling someone what she's up to' means when it's at home, because it certainly doesn't involve 'mention the fact she might be conspiring to murder someone'. The word she has in mind is 'closure', but the image is of rain, and it doesn't involve talking it out.

“Did you get it?” she asks, one hand clutching the other elbow, one hand by her thigh, looking up towards him as he comes down.

[ closed ] dusk dropped her starry gown

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ugh how did i edit my last tag for repetition and MISS DIFFERENT REPETITION curse you reed richards

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tw: suicide

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